We were really looking forward to the Ellora caves. Thankfully it was on the way to Mumbai because when we got there we discovered it was closed one day a week and today was that day... Once again we made slow progress. Rolling out of Indore we intended to make the caves before sundown but arrived half an hour after sunset. Night driving in India is very dangerous. A lot of people set their lights very high to improve their vision or just drive along with their high beam on. The idiocy of the driving here and the complete lack of evolved concern for the greater good takes a lot of adapting too.
As we are a month behind schedule we are here during the monsoon. That at least makes for some nice green pastures and lush scenery.
Along the way we stopped at one of the many toll booths that lie on the national highways. These generally move quite slowly because the people working inside them move at a snails pace. The truck in front of us thought the parallel queue might be faster so he did something very typical of the intelligence of most Indian road users and put his truck in reverse without any idea what was behind him and simply backed up so he could swing into the next lane. Sadly we were behind him and he crashed into the front of our car, taking out our left headlight and damaging the front substructure that supports the headlights and the grill. Not catastrophic but far from ideal. Now we have to source another light and fix the substructure when we get home. It's the stupidity of it that really annoys me. What sort of idiot just puts his truck in reverse to save a few seconds without being able to see what's behind him? It's so typical of what we see on Indian roads every day. Stupidity. I gave him a hell of a serving which made me feel a little bit better. He gave me र600 ($12) which he claimed was all he had on him. Obviously the damage will cost at least twenty times that to fix. Most of his teeth were ground down to their roots and you could see what looked like the core of the teeth if they have such a thing. He wouldn't have been thirty and spoke Hindi and didn't seem to know what to make of the strange white man yelling at him.
The highlight of the rest of the journey was a mountain pass. Sadly the abundance of suicidal Indian drivers made it much harder to enjoy.
That night we crawled into some accommodation at the caves. We where told the hot water was solar only and thus there was no hot water. Why? Plenty of sun here at the moment in between the rain. The answer was revealed in the morning and is typically Indian. Check out the picture. Also the bed had been made with wet sheets and a wet rug so we had a pretty awful nights sleep. Still feeling very sick.
The next days drive took us in to Mumbai. It was a full days drive over some roads that varied from modern tarmac to roads so broken and pot holed we where in first gear for a good half hour. Even twenty minutes from Mumbai, a city of fourteen million people the traffic would have to slow to a crawl in random places because of the quality of the surface. The road was referred to as an 'expressway'. Again we were racing the setting sun, keen to make it in by darkness. In Mumbai the monsoonal rains had flooded many of the roads because the quality of the drainage here, like everywhere in India it seems, is pretty poor. Our little Alfa did some pretty serious fjording (for an Alfa!). When we arrived we were exhausted. I have not been able to eat properly since my last food poisoning session and Julians strange affliction was affecting him badly. We both needed to crash for a while but we had made it to Mumbai, the other side of India.
Man and machine were a bit battered but we had crossed India.